


Think

by Phiso



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock - Fandom, Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: BBC Sherlock - Freeform, Gen, Young Sherlock, warning: drug use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-15
Updated: 2012-06-15
Packaged: 2017-11-07 19:23:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/434518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phiso/pseuds/Phiso
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Sherlock is a troubled university student. This was why he took the morphine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Think

This was why he took the morphine.

 

Sometimes it was too much. Sometimes he had too many thoughts, sometimes he saw too much and thought too much and the world became a tangling, swirling mass of color and sound, interrupted by sharp images still as a photograph. He saw everything, and no one understood how much of a burden that could be, no one could see.

 

His professors were all idiots, just ordinary, overworked and overused people who told themselves their publications made them smart. There was so much to learn and they kept taking precisely the wrong route, wasting his time and turning the material into a cesspool of _boring_. It was the worst crime imaginable. People were boring, yes, but the world wasn't, the world was fascinating; it was just the people around him making it so, and it infuriated him to no end. They could not understand his lack of focus or his inability to sit down and simply listen to the lectures and complete the coursework. They could memorize, they could connect, but they were not like him. They could not see without effort. And now here he was, faced with loads of coursework he considered the definition of inane and a deadline, a looming deadline that meant only mattered to the professor and his poor students, the unfortunate souls that were forced to play the game to get what they thought they wanted.

 

He didn't want to pass to feel a sense of accomplishment; he wanted to pass to leave. He wanted to pass with high marks so that Mycroft wouldn't mock him, because Mycroft had been perfect and for him to be anything less would never be forgotten. But he didn't care about this material, a good third of which he already knew and another third he knew would never be applicable in the future. For a top-notch university, Sherlock was feeling intellectually suffocated, and it took everything he had to not take it out on someone in more than just some cutting observations.

 

He knew what he wanted. And this was not it. But he had to do it, because for now, while he was young, while he was still seen as a child even though his voice had dropped long ago, he had to play by their rules. The world was set against him and his endeavors, and he had to figure out how to manipulate the strings around him to get what he wanted.

 

But it killed him inside, because below this thin focus on the game, Sherlock could feel all of these thoughts bubbling, threatening to overflow and burn everything. He didn't care about most of his lessons, and was already planning to forget half of the lectures the moment he finished his finals. But for now, right now, he couldn't get his mind to shut up, to stop noticing the cracks in the library window and the suspicious scents from the stairwell and the way his things had moved in the two and a half minutes he had left for a sip of water. He kept creating reasons, causes for these things, imagining possibilities and determining the likelihood of them, so busy trying to read the world around him that he simply _could not focus_ on the words he needed to read instead.

 

Sometimes his mind thought too fast and too much, and he wasn't quite ready to quit school yet, not when he hadn't exhausted its resources.

 

Which was why, in the privacy of his room, before he had to study or take an exam, he took the morphine.

 

To calm down

so he could think.

**Author's Note:**

> The first draft of this is on my tumblr (notdoingmywork), so no worries, that's supposed to be there.


End file.
